Archive for February, 2008

I’ve long been fascinated to hear how different artists interpret the same piece of music, and stumbled across these two examples of a track called God is God in my recent travels around YouTube.

This one’s by Laibach, a Slovenian experimental industrial music and performance art group that’s been around since 1980…

…and this is a very different version from Juno Reactor (aka Ben Watkins and friends), who among other things was responsible for the soundtrack to The Matrix – possibly the most pompous, over-rated science fiction film of all time. It features the voice of Natacha Atlas along with footage borrowed from The Color of Pomegranates, the extraordinary, gorgeously surreal 1968 film by Armenian director Sergei Parajanov…

The UT team intend to use this forum to bring our listeners regular updates from across the ambient universe – including new release information, reviews, interviews and lots of other interesting stuff that we can’t, for one reason or other, put to air on the show itself.

We hope you enjoy it, and look forward to your input.

To kick things off, here’s a sample of funky middle-eastern now-sounds from world citizen Natacha Atlas: Leysh Natarak? (Why are we fighting?)…

…and a classic 1960s concert performance by the great Egyptian singer Om Kalthoum; popularly known as “the Star of the East”, 4 million people thronged the streets of Cairo for her funeral in 1975, and her albums still outsell those of many contemporary performers nearly 40 years later. The track is entitled El Ghazaly…